Pages

Friday, June 28, 2013

I probably should have tried Marijuana

In a daring raid in 1948, Robert Mitchum got caught smoking
marijuana in Hollywood:

Sept. 1, 1948:
Actor Robert Mitchum and starlet Lila Leeds were reportedly caught smoking
marijuana during a police raid at the actress' Hollywood Hills home. Two others
were also arrested.

Mitchum told police that he and another friend were in the neighborhood looking
to buy a house when they stopped to visit Leeds and her roommate, dancer Vickie
Evans.

The actor said he had trouble finding the home on Ridpath Drive, which one narcotics agent described as
"ideally situated to be a 'reefer resort.' It is perched on a hillside,
with no near neighbors, and well-screened by shrubbery," The [Los Angeles] Times reported.

It was reported in the Times but I lived in Michigan,
we didn’t yet have the tabloids (or the internet), and I was not quite 11 years
old, so it got right past me. (Hedda Hopper might have hinted about it in the
movie mags but her hints weren’t always clear.In her juiciest scoops, the principals remained nameless.(“What handsome, dark-haired bad boy was
caught smoking dope with a blond starlet who wasn’t his wife?” )

Fortunately, a few years later a magazine called Confidential surfaced; a juicy, slimy precursor
to the tabloids, and eventually they got around to the story about the not-so-current
arrest of that bad boy, Bob Mitchum.I
remember reading it as a teenager, thinking that man is treading on some
dangerous ground there.(Maybe not in
those words, exactly.I probably didn’t
talk like that. The point is, I was a teenager, I had seen Reefer Madness!, and I was shocked!)

The article about Mitchum is long gone, but I’m remembering
his picture this way:He’s leaning
toward the camera as if he’s trying to get up but can’t.His eyes are half-closed, the famous Mitchum
sneer is all over his face. His hair is damp and matted and probably dirty.It might have been the picture of a drunk,
but it wasn’t.It was much worse.Robert Mitchum was stoned. On Reefer.And it wasn’t the first time.

The shock of it must have marked me for life.Marijuana was a terrible drug.It was bad.The baddest of the bad.Normal people didn’t go in for it, they went
in for alcohol.

In Michigan in
the 50s the drinking age was 21.In Wisconsin,
it was 18, so I had my first legitimate drink while we were on our honeymoon at
the Wisconsin Dells.It was a Tom
Collins and it was delicious.No doubt I would
have liked it just as well without the alcohol, but in Wisconsin, anyway, I was a grown up!.We ran around with a drinking crowd most of our young lives but I was never much of a
drinker.The few times I got drunk my
body let me know in the most violent ways that there were some things it would
not tolerate and an overabundance of alcohol was one of them.So be it.

Until around the early 70s I didn’t know anyone who had ever
smoked pot.We had new neighbors move in
right next door and the guy immediately started a pot garden in the back
yard.When his plants were mature, he
started selling his crop.Their house
was close enough so that at all hours of the night we could hear knocking on
their door and the low rumble of short conversation.I gave up thinking poorly of them when I grew
to like them for the crazy, dear people they were.I felt incredibly sophisticated.I knew pot people!

Then our neighbor two doors over found out that we had never
smoked pot.It was our anniversary and
we were going away for the weekend to celebrate, so she decided this would be
the perfect time to experiment.She
brought over a gaily wrapped package of pot brownies and insisted I pack them
in our suitcase.

They went with us but neither of us wanted to indulge.Truth is, I was scared to death of them. (Reefer Madness!)I shoved them way in the back of my underwear
drawer and forgot about them.

So last week my daughter and I were talking about how silly
it was that marijuana hasn’t yet been legalized.I said, “I can’t really understand the effects of pot since I never
tried it.I probably should have, at
least once in my life.”Then I dropped
the bombshell on her:I told about the
time I had a whole package of pot brownies in our house.

I waited for her reaction. She looked at me, startled, and then she began
to laugh.“I know you did, mom.I ate them!”

Turns out I had told my teenaged daughter about the
brownies, never once thinking that it would be anything that would interest her
so much she would be stealing them out of my drawer, little by little so I
wouldn’t notice, and sharing them with her friends.

I know nothing about life.Nothing.Pay no attention to
me.I know nothing.

I welcome your input and want to keep this as open as possible, so I will watch for and delete comments that are spam, vicious or obscene. (Also, please note that I've switched to Disqus for comments. Hope this clears up any commenting problems. If not, please let me know.)

Followers

My Facebook page

Tweet, tweet

Pinterest

Thanks to the Labor Movement

"The real two-party system in America is the Meanies and the Weenies. The Meanies want to take away your benefits and the Weenies want to compromise with them."

From Political Loud Mouth

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a Liberal."

-John Kennedy

Any Other Questions??

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Written by Lawrence O'Donnell and spoken by Jimmy Smits as Matt Santos on The West Wing

About the Photographs:

Many of the photographs, unless clearly historic or news-related, are the property of Ramona's Voices. It's only polite to provide a link back to this site when using them. Letting me know you've used one would be good, too.